Spoilers Star Trek: Lower Decks 1x01 - "Second Contact"

Observations:

The intro is amazing with the ship hitting everything and nopeing out of the Borg battle XD
The shuttles are named after National Parks
2 people wear Visors
We see an Andorian, a Benzite (with breathing thing), a Bolian
A turboshaft goes down the aft strut
They have cetacean ops!
There's an old California flag in the ready room
Bar glasses look like those in 10 Forward
They have the old phasers and tricorders
A Vulcan has black slime on his face that looks like Spock's beard XD
Mariner seems to be the Captain's daughter
She wants Boimler to be her cha'DIch, tells him about Spock returning from death, fighting Khan with the Genesis device and some space whales, Sulu rocking a sword, asks about Kirk, Worf, Gary Mitchell, Deanna!

And in the season preview:
A space jellyfish that could be related to Farpoint
Klingon disruptors from all eras and timelines are for sale at some desert basar
They might have to fly through the neutral zone into Romulan space

 

I was not expecting the mother-daughter dynamic. The show and dialogue is pretty fast paced, but it feels appropriate for the series.

 

And still nothing about an international release.

 

what kind of whales was in the probe?

 

That was very delightful first episode.

The visuals are great.
The sound effects straight from TNG were wonderful to hear.
The music also felt very light and TNG-like as well.
I also didn't expect the mother-daughter connection.

Season Trailer:
- AREX!!!!!! Or at least one of his species.

 

Mariner is really going to get on my nerve big time. also why wasn't she written up for stabbing Boimler with the Bath'leth.

 

It's gonna be a couple of months sadly, but we are gonna get it.

 

Well, that sucked. Congrats on being 0 for 3, CBSAA Trek.

 

It was a probe. No whales in it. Are there humans on the Voyager probe?

 

Probably the best first episode of any Star Trek series.

 

So much of the show seems poorly conceived. Ensign Mariner is a fuck up who doesn’t give a shit, but she’s also a hypercompetent know-it-all who insists on being the acknowledged as smartest one in the room. The latter part also happens to make her insufferable.

The premise itself seems broken at its core. So much of the pre-release copy about the show joked about how the Cerritos was one of the “least important” ships in the fleet, but all of the senior officers still seem very capable and professional. No one is a coward or a screw-up or and no one fucks up.

The show could have been either:

It focuses on the junior officers on the greatest ship in the fleet who are frustrated that they are adjacent to greatness, but not actually a part of it.

or

The senior officers are screw-ups and only the junior officers are capable of saving the day, even though they never get any credit for it.

The show itself has no point of view and very few actual jokes. It needlessly namedrops characters from across the franchise as if just mentioning them is supposed to be funny or, I dunno, endearing or whatever.

 

source?

 

So.... This is "humor."

 

It is a difficult concept.

 

Loved the intro. Just hightailing it away from the Borg-Romulan space battle seems a prudent measure.

As suspected, there's an A plot and a B plot, and they tied together at the end. There's an overall "senior staff" plot barely seen given our POV with the Lower Deck officers.

I suspect she was, and that's why the Captain picked Boimler to report on her.

Boimler appears to be gay (or bi) given his predilection towards an all-male nude Olympics holoprogram. Nice subtle representation. I'm not sure I like the idea that the holodeck is just available for anyone to wander in without scheduling time in it (surely it would be almost universally used), although maybe that one was "down for maintenance" or something.

 

It was OK. I gave it a 7.

When they announced the series I thought it was interesting that the main character and the Captain were both black females (take that white nationalist a-holes!) but didn't expect they would be related.

No offense to the voice actor but the way Mariner speaks is a little annoying. I hope they tone her down.

Nice to see the episode title listed in the credits. That's a Star Trek tradition that was missing from Discovery and Picard.

Mcmahan is listed as the sole creator of the series. So Kurtzman, unlike Berman, doesn't demand to be the co-creator of all the series on his watch.

Chris Westlake did the music and the theme.

I liked that Rutherford's Vulcan cybernetic implant made him more logical.

Also liked that Boimler's Holodec fantasy is the warp core of their own ship.

Was that a Gormegander in the opening credits?

 

Hard to know how I feel. I enjoyed it, but it was a little hard to absorb some of the events. It was pretty frenetic.

At risk of being derided as an SJW or whatever, I hope that one of the main characters is LGBTQ+. So far only heterosexual romance was seen.

Barnes appears to be a Trill. Why does she have a human name? Half-Trill, maybe?

Rutherford's implant has me curious. Are Starfleet officers allowed to get cybernetic enhancement at any time? I had assumed that Rutherford had some kind of accident or something, but it really seems he volunteered to have the implant.

 

Uh, that was Mariner's program. Boimler had already left the room.

 

I read somewhere that he has a girlfriend, and it was Mariner's program.

 

Which is just the kind of thing we want to see from a Starfleet crew when an invasive force is storming through the galaxy, is turning around and going away.

Starfleet!

The episode may have been more enjoyable without Mariner because, man, couple minutes in and I wanted to see her tossed out an airlock.